Page 36 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

I wake up to a soft creaking and the sight of Jake and Zian peering at the phone with the electronic glow splashed across their faces. Dominic is lying against a different stack of crates, the hood of his parka pulled up to cushion his head, but when I move to join the others, he stirs and sits up.

All I can make out of Riva is her sneakered feet poking out from the thicker shadows where she’s tucked herself in an alcove between more of the boxes.

“Don’t leave it on too much,” I say in a hushed voice, sinking down next to Jacob. “We don’t know when we’ll be able to recharge the battery.”

“We got that extra battery pack,” he mutters.

“Yeah, and eventually that needs to be recharged too.”

He sighs, but he turns off the phone. “We’re coming up on an interchange. Based on how fast this thing has been moving, I’d say we’ll get there in twenty minutes or so. Then we’ll have to see whether it keeps going the way we want, stops to unload, or veers off in the wrong direction.”

We might have to get off, he means. I nod and glance toward Riva. “Should we wake her up?”

“No point until we know for sure, right?” Zian says before Jacob can answer.

Jacob grimaces. “If she is even sleeping and not pretending so she can listen in.”

Listen in to what? What secret plans are we making that he thinks she’d want to spy on?

I fight down the urge to shake the guy. I know I don’t understand how it’s been for him in the past four years, but at some point, he needs to open his eyes and see that he’s imagining a monster that isn’t here.

Dominic moves closer to Riva with quiet steps and rests his hand gently on her calf. “She’s definitely asleep,” he murmurs a moment later. “Pretty deeply too. I don’t know how much rest she’s gotten in the last few days.”

If she can’t hear us, then Jake can’t object to me bringing up the specific issue that’s been niggling at me more and more during those few days. I turn to him, making my voice as firm as I can manage.

“I think it’s time we got rid of the poison.”

Jacob snorts. “So, you’ve totally fallen for her fragile victim act, huh?”

I glower at him. “She hasn’t been acting like a victim, and the only times she’s gotten fragile are when the toxin has worn her down.

She’s killed for us in at least two different fights with the guardians, even if you don’t believe she hurt any of them when we first escaped.

Whatever happened in the past, she’s obviously on our side now. ”

“For how long?” Jacob demands, his voice harsh even as he keeps it low to avoid waking her.

“You saw her back there, getting all weepy and whiny. Either that was a fantastic show of acting, which means we can’t trust anything still, or she thinks she shouldn’t have to prove herself after everything she did before. ”

“Is that what you got out of the things she said?” I shake my head.

“We’ve been beating her down this entire time, and she’s been taking it.

Do you really think she’s enjoyed it? If she cares at all about us, which she clearly does, then of course the way we’ve treated her would be hard for her.

But she didn’t say a word about it until she realized even that could help us. ”

“And when she was drunk.”

“That wasn’t her fault either,” Dominic says. “The alcohol mixed with the poison really messed things up.”

She’s shown a little of the pain inside her only to me, too, but I’m not going to mention our conversation in the car. I encouraged her to see me as the one person among us she could open up to, and I’m not bringing up what she said then when all it’ll get me is more snarky remarks from Jake.

“She’s doing what she needs to do to survive,” Zian says abruptly. “If something happens to us, she knows the poison would kill her. We can’t be sure if she cares for any reason other than that.”

Okay, now I want to shake him too. Why does he have to bring out his bull-headed stubbornness now?

“There’s too much on the line,” Jacob says before I can keep arguing. “If she tips off the guardians somehow at this point, we’ll lose all the progress we’ve made, and we might never be able to find Engel again. We’ll have nothing.”

He meets my gaze steadily. “Once we’ve found out everything we can from the scientist, then we can talk about fully healing her.”

Jake is always way too good at making his perspective sound like the most reasonable one. My jaw clenches, but I don’t actually have a counterargument that I can imagine him accepting.

And Dom, the only one of us who could override Jacob’s decision on the matter if he wanted to, has gone back to his typical silence.

I feel the need to try one more time anyway. “Even if back then she got caught up in some promise the guardians made or?—”

Jacob doesn’t even let me get to my point. He jerks forward, even the little warmth he’d shown me a moment ago vanishing behind the ice of his eyes.

“ If ? We know what she did. Don’t try to wave it away now. Griffin deserves a hell of a lot better than that.”

My mouth clamps shut. There’s nothing I can say when the guy who’s no longer with us is invoked. Even if inside, there’s a question that’s started tugging at me and won’t go away.

Do we really know even that much?

The train car jostles with a metallic squeal, and Riva flinches where she was sleeping. She shoves herself upright looking both panicked and bleary-eyed, strands of her rumpled hair that’ve come free from her braid floating around her face.

“We must be at the interchange,” Jacob says, ignoring her and pulling out the phone. “Let’s see where our ride is going to take us from here.”

As he studies the screen and the car shudders again, Riva slinks closer. She sits cross-legged a few feet from any of us, clearly not feeling comfortable outright joining our circle. In the thin light, the weariness etched on her pretty face makes my gut tighten up.

I want to pull her into my arms and hug her tight like I did before, but I’m not sure how much she’d welcome the gesture. It wouldn’t actually do her much good anyway.

Instead, I motion to Dominic. “You should heal Riva up in case we need to make a run for it.”

Dom moves to her side despite his tight expression, because that’s an explanation they’ll all accept—not to cure her completely, but to make sure she doesn’t become a liability. Because apparently that’s what we’re now reducing this girl to.

The girl who was once just as vital to our group as Griffin was.

A memory rises up in my head of some afternoon not that long before our escape attempt, when Riva and Griffin were standing near each other in the training room, and he leaned over to say something by her ear. She laughed with that secretive little smile that made her whole face shine…

Only he could ever make her light up quite like that.

I also remember the jab of jealousy that ran through me even as I basked in the sight. I could make her laugh, sure, but not quite like that. There was always something a little more with him.

The one thing I’ve never understood, no matter what we’ve seen, was how she could have given up that light. Not just given it up—destroyed it and the guy who sparked it.

But what if she didn’t? What if we’ve been completely wrong all this time?

If anyone’s going to figure it out, it’s got to be me—both because she has started opening up to me, and because none of the other guys are willing to even consider the possibility.

And if I’m going to figure it out, then for all our sakes, I’d better do it soon.

The train jolts and rattles, and Jacob looks up from the phone. “It’s taking the southwest route. This one isn’t good anymore.” He gets to his feet. “Everybody ready to jump?”